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How AI Can Help Fight Wildfires


Wildfires are one of the most devastating natural disasters that threaten lives, property and ecosystems around the world. In 2021, more than 6.5 million acres of land were burned by wildfires in the U.S., and many more were affected by fires in other regions such as Siberia, Australia and the Mediterranean. To combat this global challenge, a collaboration between NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin and federal forest services is using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twin simulation to better understand, predict and respond to wildfires.

What is a digital twin?


A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical system or environment that can be used to simulate, analyze and optimize its behavior and performance. A digital twin can incorporate data from various sources, such as sensors, satellites, weather models and historical records, to create a realistic and dynamic model of the system or environment.

How can a digital twin help fight wildfires?

A digital twin of a wildfire can help fire response teams by providing them with a high-resolution, accurate and timely depiction of the fire's location, size, direction, speed and intensity. By recreating the fire in a physically accurate digital twin, the system can also suggest actions to best suppress the blaze, such as deploying resources, creating fire breaks or evacuating residents.

What are the technologies behind the digital twin?


The collaboration between NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin and federal forest services is using several advanced technologies to create and use the digital twin of wildfires. These include:

- NVIDIA AI infrastructure: NVIDIA DGX systems are used to process large amounts of data and train AI models that can ingest, format and fuse observations from multiple sources into a gridded data product and detect anomalies.

- NVIDIA Omniverse: NVIDIA Omniverse is an advanced visualization and simulation platform that can convert data into the Universal Scene Description framework, enabling data-sharing across multiple tools and between researchers. Omniverse can also render realistic 3D graphics of the fire and its surroundings using ray tracing and rasterization techniques.

- Lockheed Martin Cognitive Mission Manager (CMM): CMM is an end-to-end AI-driven planning and orchestration platform that combines real-time sensor data about the fire with other data sources on fuel vegetation, topography, wind and more to predict the fire's spread. CMM provides course-of-action recommendations to the incident command teams to decrease response time and increase effectiveness of wildfire suppression and humanitarian actions.

- Agatha: Agatha is a Lockheed Martin-developed visualization platform that ingests incoming data from Omniverse Nucleus and allows users to interact with it in an Earth-centric 3D environment.

What are the benefits of the collaboration?


The collaboration between NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin and federal forest services aims to provide a novel solution to fight wildfires. Some of the benefits of this solution are:

- Faster and more accurate detection of wildfires using AI models trained on large datasets

- Better understanding of wildfire behavior and dynamics using realistic and dynamic simulations

- Improved decision making and resource allocation using AI-generated recommendations

- Enhanced situational awareness and communication using immersive 3D visualization

- Reduced risk to fire crews and residents using proactive and preventive measures


Wildfires are a serious threat that requires innovative solutions. By leveraging AI and simulations, NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin and federal forest services are working together to create a powerful tool that can help fight wildfires more effectively and efficiently. This collaboration is an example of how technology can be used for good and make a positive impact on society and the environment.

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